Recent Posts

Reviewers’ Comments

"Great read every day. Makes me smile as Rab muses about music and his irreverent views on the EU. Tune in, you won't be disappointed."

"Excellent 'Blog' which can be controversial at times, while maintaining it's humour. Keep it up Big Rab!"

"Updated every day with doses of good humour, political satire, a running commentary on the progress of author's home football team and his life."

"Pure brilliant, so it is - I never miss it, though God knows, I've tried."

"An inspiration to start my own blog"

"For dipping into it's better than pakora sauce"

"Anyone who doesn't like the EU and has a soft spot for Albion Rovers can't be all bad"

"Facile and False"

"Populist,puerile and prosaic"

"Utter pish! Keep it up, I love it!"

"People may also find the Ben Lomond Free Press blog illuminating, interesting and/or amusing. It’s not mentalist as such but familiar themes emerge. I particularly like accounts of encounters with strange elementals (of course! ELEmentals!) from elfin safety. And the fact that the blog is run by someone who plays in a blues band called Harmonica Lewinsky."

Hit Me!

1,293,456 hits since January 2008

Top Rated

I’ve had a chuckle or two here over the years at North Korea and their sometimes bizarre, sometimes quaint news agency. For instance if you have a look here you can read an article published yesterday quoting DPRK ‘newspaper’ Rodong Sinmun headed “Rodong Sinmun Calls for Turning Country into Socialist Fairyland”

It is of course perfectly ok to laugh at such stuff. It’s ridiculous in the extreme.

However as tensions in the Korean peninsula escalate, it is worth examining just what is going on inside the DPRK. The west in general has been trying to suss out just what Kim Jong Un and his regime want from what has appeared until now to be sabre rattling.

Now though there are reports that the army in the isolated state is divided and that the reason for Kim Jong Un’s threats towards South Korea and America is a last ditch attempt to unite them behind him. That may or may not be true but it does fit with the evidence.

The worry has to be that the leadership has abandoned any trace of rationality and is prepared to launch a ‘holy war’. One can imagine Kim Jong Un as a kind of David Koresh character leading a nation or as a pilot just about to fly a jet into the World Trade Centre.

The article below from the Sydney Morning Herald gives some insight into current events in North Korea.

A defining moment in the North Korean narrative is the Korean War of 1950-53, when the Communist leader Kim Il-sung led the North in an invasion of the South and was pushed back by US-led forces. Schoolchildren in the People’s Republic are taught that American troops carried out atrocities against their grandparents and that the US would do it all again were it not for the iron leadership of the Kim family. Equally important is what happened afterwards. In peacetime, the tyrannical Kim Il-sung’s power was challenged by liberal reformers, and his response was to shift the ideological justification for the regime away from Marxism and towards a unique quasi-religious nationalism called Juche. Kim became like a God, and when he died he remained head of state, governing from the afterlife.

In official accounts, the birth of his successor, Kim Jong-il, was accompanied by the appearance of a double rainbow. This secretive boy with a bouffant was cast as the God of sport, among other things. When he played his first ever round of golf in 1994, he supposedly scored 11 holes-in-one; North Korea’s football coach said that Jong-il guided the team during the 2010 World Cup with the help of an invisible phone – technology that the regime claimed the leader himself had invented. When the next in line, Kim Jong-un, came to power in 2011, the pantheon gained a more gregarious deity, who smiled a lot and visited people in their homes.

North Korea is governed by fantasists, but the fantasy is bolstered by a network of gulags; hard currency raised through drug trafficking and counterfeiting money; the development of nuclear arms; and a huge stockpile of conventional weapons that could level South Korea. Moreover, all this barbarism is justified by a good v evil struggle with the US. The eternal fight against “imperialism” legitimises the Kim family’s control of the country; when famine struck in the 1990s, the regime blamed a US embargo and credited the limited relief that was allowed into the country to Kim Jong-il’s personal diplomacy. Confronting the US is a matter of personal honour, a fact underlined by an extraordinary order given that, should war occur, a priority must be protecting the nation’s 35,000 statues of the Kims.
Advertisement

It is possible that the present crisis is being manufactured for the benefit of the home audience, that Kim Jong-un is reinforcing the propaganda that it is his family that protects the people from US aggression, by first stirring up aggression and then resolving it through diplomacy. But, considering the regime’s failing grip on reality, two things could go wrong. First, North Korea might raise the stakes so high that diplomacy becomes impossible and backing down would undermine its authority. This is a regime that would allow its people to suffer rather than accept any compromise.

A second possibility is that the hermit kingdom surrenders to the mad logic of Juche and launches an all-out holy war on the West. Most religions have some element of apocalypse in their theology, and North Korea is no exception. If Kim Jong-un judges that the time has come to purify the South of democracy and invades, his action would surely prompt an American response that, in turn, would draw China into the conflict. It is a terrifying thought that this slightly farcical regime could trigger the war to end all wars.

Like this:

Related

3 Responses

Total bullshit from the SMH. Juche is neither a theology or a religion but a political thesis. (The word means “subject” or “main body”.) It is based on Marxian ideas and I doubt Uncle Karl would have had anything to do with a “holy war”.

Mind you, I think I better check the small print on my travel insurance.

Hmm I have just checked on my invisible phone and it says that the concept of an eternal leader does lean towards the religious. But I suppose 35,000 statues can’t be wrong. Sent from my HTC via gmx mail

According to my dictionary, “quasi-religious” means “resembling something that is religious.” In that sense, I think the SMH’s descriptive phrase of “quasi-religious nationalism” hit the nail on the head.

I have always assumed it’s about the money. The Kims and the apparatus propping them up have no desire for peaceful interactions with democratic countries as they know the inevitable free exchange of information that would follow would mark the end of their privileged existence, and of course they wouldn’t stand a chance in a popular election.

Perhaps we should do what we’ve often done with these nasty dictators: buy them off and find a nice place of exile to live out their days.